The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts is the largest museum of European art in Moscow.
Opened to the public in 1912 as the Tsar Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts, the museum was renamed in 1937 in honour of the poet Alexander Pushkin to mark the centenary of his death.
The facility was actually conceived originally as a facility for the University of Moscow's art history department and so the original collection is actually copies of great works by Italian, Greek and Roman artists.
A second collection - housed in a separate building alongside - comprises the entire Russian collection of Western art, brought together by the Soviet government over several decades, and including one of the finest collection of Impressionist art anywhere in the world.
Professor Ivan Tsvetaev was the facility's founder, a man determined to give Moscow a museum of fine arts who talked millionaire philanthropist YurivNechaev-Maltsov into financing his dream to the tune of 2 million roubles.
Ancient statuary and plaster casts, considered crucial for the education of art students, were among the first exhibits and today the museum maintains an enormous collection of sculptures from Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Rome, alongside examples from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance period.
The end of the Tsarist era with the 1917 October Revolution saw St Petersburg lose its status as the nation's capital and more than power was returned to Moscow.
The Soviet government also moved thousands of works of art from St Petersburg's famous Hermitage Museum to the Moscow and this, along with the collection of Western Art from Moscow's Rumyantsev Museum, began the State Museum of Fine Arts' collection of Western art.
Other works later added to the collection included Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by the likes of Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Courbet and Matisse.
These works are contained in the separate Gallery of 19 th century painters alongside the museum's main building. Take note - you will need to buy a separate ticket if you want to view these masterpieces.
The museum is not without controversy, too. Art from the Dresden Gallery had been evacuated during the Second World War bombardment of the German city and the collection stored in Moscow for a decade. Despite opposition from those running the museum, in 1955 the Soviet hierarchy returned the collection to Dresden, by that time an East German city and so part of the Soviet bloc.
The Pushkin Museum also holds some of Priam's treasure, gold looted from Troy by German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the 19 th century. The Red Army in turn took the gold from the Pergamon Museum in Berlin after the German capital fell in 1945.
A treaty between Russia and Germany is supposed to see the return of the gold but the Russian government has insisted that it will keep the treasure as compensation for acts of destruction carried out by the Nazis during the Second World War.
For a century, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts has told fascinating stories of art and works of art, and that is set to continue.
